Hmmm. I hope I didn't drive down the moderation on this. Yeah, it was phrased a bit trolly, and I (IMHO) had a valid qualm, but the rest of the info in here I would have given an "Informative" for if I still had my points.
That was the damnedest thing I ever saw here. A normal-ish story turned into a giant intercontinental group therapy session. Yeah, I got picked on in school (mostly middle school). Perhaps I knew one person in my class who had it worse than me. But I had no concept of how many people got it that bad or worse, and the sheer amount of accumulated pain being poured out was mind-boggling.
There was just flat out no way to look at it all and not realize you were staring straight at a Real Problem(tm).
In the not-too-distant past the dominant voice on this site took a hard right turn
You know, it just don't see it that way.
The way I remember it, there were *always* people of all political stripes here. If anyone is really over-represented, its Libertarians, who will sound like right-wingers when a Democrat is in office and like left-wingers when a Republican is in office. I'm not Libertarian, but I've never really minded whatever today's slant is, because well-reasoned arguments will get voted up, and worst-case I get to see what other people with different political beliefs than mine consider a persuasive argument.
When I had trouble was the final stages of the 2016 election. All appearances were that the comment/moderation system here got pwned by Russian trolls, with the result that the stuff that got upvoted bore no relationship whatsoever to the quality of the thoughts. It made the website completely unusable for me. First major election since 2000 where I couldn't rely on./ to get valuable insight into both sides of the issues. Damn shame, that.
The other issue/. tends to have is with any problem that doesn't particularly afflict its userbase (for the most part, technically proficient young white males). There's nothing wrong with not having any experience with what life is like when you're outside that demographic, but there's a lot wrong with not deferring at least a little to the expertise of those that do.
None of the normal news sites would come up. That is odd I thought. Continued onto/., where I first saw the post about it.
Interesting that we'd be mentioning the news lifeline that/. was on 9/11.
At the time, I worked in Oklahoma at a company whose corporate access point to the Internet was in the basement of tower 2. When it collapsed, we lost connectivity (of course). That's when I decided I had to go home for the day. I was NOT going to do without the first-hand online news on/., and it was clear nobody was actually going to be getting any real work done that day.
Nope. Time to go home where I can get news and cry for a while.
It works OK when its not under any kind of serious organized attack. During the 2016 election organized groups of Russian accounts (likely paid, if the various people who have investigated this can be believed) completely pwned the/. moderation system.
OTOH, if you WANTED to read a lot Russian-flavored pro-Trump messages all saying the same things, Slashdot during the last quarter of 2016 was the place to hang out.
While this is an interesting argument, I'd like to point out, as someone who has been using BT headphones for the last 3 years, that I have to replace headphones way more often than cellular devices. I think I'm on my 3rd set with this phone, and the right bud on this one has a short, so the third is not long for this world either.
So moving the "high end DAC" to the headset may have some advantages, but not having to rebuy it as often is NOT one of them.
Ack. I mean "high-uid". That actually shows part of what happened though. I had to ditch/. for sites that had more developed systems of user moderation (where a troll's new account will have "low" reputation) that I no longer am even used to thinking in/. terms about these things.
/. really needs to quit puttering with the shininess of the UI and modernize their reputation system. There are enough of us dedicated users to fend off Troll attacks, if they'd just give us the tools to do so.
I find it amusing that this was posted here, with no mention whatsoever about how hard Slashdot failed us as well during the same period. It was so pwned by low-uid posters with pro-Russian (and only incidentally pro-Trump) posts that I had to quit reading. Anything sensible got modded down to oblivion, and the only way you even knew it ever existed at all was if a Russian ridiculing it got modded +5 insightful.
Previous elections I really relied on/. for good well-reasoned statements of positions on both sides. The paid Russian trolls this time around made it completely useless.
Back in the '90's I was living in Malvern, PA and commuting to Camden, NJ every day to work. My cube-mate used to bring a bottle of store-bought water in every day. Every day I'd joke about taking the empty home, filling it at the tap, and selling it back to him an nickel cheaper.
Then one day I looked at the fine print on the label: "Bottled in Malvern, PA".
The thing I found interesting is that when they searched his car, the guy seems to have had one of every kind of storage device known to man in it. Now I'm a professional software engineer, and yes, when I travel on business I travel with gear, including usually one or two USB sticks and a laptop, but this was ridiculous:
128GB USB Ram stick
Another thumb drive of unreported size
10 SIM cards
1 SD card
2 Micro SD cards
2 portable hard drives
*TWO* digital camcorders
Is there an engineer here who can honestly say they've ever traveled with that full a panoply of recording media on them? Oh, wait, he wasn't an engineer either. He said he was a lawyer...
Whatever he was doing, it wasn't engineering as I know it, and he seemed almost comically concerned about being able to record data no matter what media hardware he bumped into on his trips (or even if none were accepted, he had camcorders).
Add to that his cover story when challenged involved name-dropping an out-of-town engineer, and then the CEO himself (the last was clearly a lie), and there aren't a lot of other conclusions one could come to.
That's a good point. I think the pirates saved Lucasfilm, in spite of itself. I remember my dad had a pretty good VHS of it that was still clearly cammed off of a movie screen.
that mostly favored Republican candidate for President Donald Trump
Yes, of course it did. Even if it didn't. It still did. It has to. Trump is evil, he can do no right.
They don't give a flying F about the man's morals. What's important to them is that his followers have been trained for decades to trust only information that confirms their beliefs and to trust that information no matter what the source. It starts with disimissing any story you don't like as "biased liberal media", and ends up with an industry of people making a living out of lying to your supporters. If only once side gets these kinds of parasites attached to it, perhaps its time to take the hint that that side has a problem.
And really these guys in Macedonia are playing for peanuts. Half of Washington these days makes their living lying to Conservatives, and that's in the Billions or Trillions. Remember all those guys who spent the last 8 years promising to kill "Obamacare" if sent to Washington? They were lying about what it does, and they were lying when they said they'd get rid of it. They are just the tip of the iceberg. There are lobbyists, TV and radio personalities, columnists, authors...
Yes, the Disney Channel is what saved their IP from total irrelevance. But did you know that it started out as a premium channel, like HBO? It took them almost 2 decades to reluctantly realize that wouldn't work and fully switch over to basic cable status. So the "Disney" world you know was one they were brought into kicking and screaming.
Back in the 70's Disney refused to license out their cartoons at a reasonable rate. Instead they produced their own TV program that would once a week air one or two of them. Meanwhile their competitors at Warner Brothers and Hanna-Barberra were tickled pink to take a nickel from anyone who wanted to air their old library.
The result was that Warner Brothers and Hanna-Barberra cartoons were constantly playing during "kid time" (after school on weekdays and Saturday mornings). All kinds of new content was being created too, as fast as it could be shoveled out. Meanwhile hardly anyone was familiar with the Disney cartoon stable, because they hardly ever saw it. Entire generations of viewers can describe Bugs Bunny cartoons in minute detail, and couldn't care less about Mickey Mouse.
They almost entirely destroyed their brand by being so tight-fisted. So now they have to go buy properties that were sensible about trying to maximize exposure (eg: Marvel, Star Wars), but it seems they still haven't learned their lesson.
Spreading out the wealth of a big company over a bigger area is a good thing. Silicon Valley/SF and California in general are out of control in terms of housing prices and cost of living.
This is the thing. I'm sure those areas a beautiful places to live too, or at least were, but they are clearly more than full up of people and can't really support more without some major structural changes to housing. Why keep trying to squeeze 100lb of potatoes into a 10lb bag?
Where I have roots in Tulsa you could buy yourself a lot of top notch engineers with decades of experience for less than 100k. We're perhaps an extreme example, but the country is chock full of places like this. Orlando, New Orleans, Kansas City, St. Louis, etc. Hell, they are practically giving houses away in Detroit.
In the 1850s, German physicist Heinrich Gustav Magnus noticed that when moving through air a spinning object such as a ball experiences a sideways force. The force comes about as follows....
This has to be the most Slashdot way ever to explain something that everyone who has ever played a sport ever needs no explanation for.
Try not to maim yourself walking from your desk to bathroom today.
It is not the faculty that is better, or the instruction, but the classmates. They learn a lot from each other. Which is why the restrictions on "collaboration" are so stupid. They are taking away the very thing that makes Harvard special.
...not to mention that nobody these days is looking to hire programmers to work solo projects. Collaboration is central to the job. I can remember during job interviews a lot of people were only interested in what my grade in the Software Engineering course was, and details about how my group project for that class went.
It was really weird being in that class because suddenly we were *supposed* to work together, and everyone (in my group at least) was absolutely terrible at it. Not only had we never done it before, but the entire culture of the university discouraged it.
I can still remember being flabbergasted after screwing up the 7th manual merge or so when my TA told me about this program the server had that did something called "Revision Control". This wasn't even being taught!
Back when I was taking CS101 in the late 80's (at one of the many "Harvard of the South"s), I remember they ran a "DIFF" on all programming assignment submissions. Three people were caught turning in the same code, and kicked out. I think the class had maybe 15 people in it tops.
I remember a lot of pearl-clutching at the time, because our school had an honor code, and those three had agreed to it. Imagine that, a signed honor code hadn't weeded out cheaters!
The only details I'd ever heard about it was that the lazy SOB's had tried to change variable names to make it look different, but otherwise hadn't even changed a byte of the source files.
The company wired up 71 users, and gave them nine sites to use, tracking their eye movement and recording the time spent on content. On average participants spent 22 per cent more time (i.e. slower task performance) looking at the pages with weak signifiers," the firm notes. Why would that be? Users were looking for clues how to navigate. "The average number of fixations was significantly higher on the weak-signifier versions than the strong-signifier versions. On average, people had 25 per cent more fixations on the pages with weak signifiers."
If you're someone who subsists on ad revenue, this is a good result. Users look at ads on your website longer than your competitors. They look hard at your ads too, because they have to look hard at everything to find what's active. They probably click on ads more often too, in a desperate attempt to find the page controls.
This reminds me of the early days of television, when shows were effectively produced by the advertisers, and their characters would seamlessly start talking about how great their sponsor's product was in the middle of the show. There were inevitably scandals, which eventually led to regulations separating commercials and the programs. But that hasn't happened on the web yet, so designers are perfectly free to be as confusing as possible about what's a website control and what's an ad.
Lorenz says another thing employers need to understand is that wages need to rise, even at entry levels, if they want to fill jobs. He says he is telling manufacturers, "If you are below $12 an hour, I don't know that I'm going to be the person to be able to help you with those jobs."
That's because in the past year, job openings have nearly doubled in western North Carolina where he works, and the supply of additional workers is shrinking fast.
Cappelli says another part of the problem is that employers haven't adjusted to new conditions. For years they've had their choice of workers desperate for a job. Now, the labor market has tightened, but many employers haven't responded, he says.
US Economy last 40 years: Recession ends -> labor market shrinks -> immigration fills the gap.
US Economy under cartoonishly anti-immigrant government: Recession ends -> labor market shrinks -> immigration goes down anyway -> OMG what do we do!!!?
Obviously wages either have to go up, or managers will have to move the work overseas. Given the attitude of US management for the last 40 years about sharing their wealth increases with workers, I know which I'd bet on...
1. In the EU, you have to stop frequently. Minimum 45 minutes per 4 1/2 hours for commercial drivers. You can lose your license if you don't. So rapid charging stops aren't a slowdown at all.
Believe it or not, in the US it is eleven hours. We have big problems with sleepy truckers on our highways. 300 miles would be in the vicinity of 4+ hours, and having a setup where they physically *have* to stop for a while every 4 hours would be a huge win for us.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm. I hope I didn't drive down the moderation on this. Yeah, it was phrased a bit trolly, and I (IMHO) had a valid qualm, but the rest of the info in here I would have given an "Informative" for if I still had my points.
That was the damnedest thing I ever saw here. A normal-ish story turned into a giant intercontinental group therapy session. Yeah, I got picked on in school (mostly middle school). Perhaps I knew one person in my class who had it worse than me. But I had no concept of how many people got it that bad or worse, and the sheer amount of accumulated pain being poured out was mind-boggling.
There was just flat out no way to look at it all and not realize you were staring straight at a Real Problem(tm).
In the not-too-distant past the dominant voice on this site took a hard right turn
You know, it just don't see it that way.
The way I remember it, there were *always* people of all political stripes here. If anyone is really over-represented, its Libertarians, who will sound like right-wingers when a Democrat is in office and like left-wingers when a Republican is in office. I'm not Libertarian, but I've never really minded whatever today's slant is, because well-reasoned arguments will get voted up, and worst-case I get to see what other people with different political beliefs than mine consider a persuasive argument.
When I had trouble was the final stages of the 2016 election. All appearances were that the comment/moderation system here got pwned by Russian trolls, with the result that the stuff that got upvoted bore no relationship whatsoever to the quality of the thoughts. It made the website completely unusable for me. First major election since 2000 where I couldn't rely on ./ to get valuable insight into both sides of the issues. Damn shame, that.
The other issue /. tends to have is with any problem that doesn't particularly afflict its userbase (for the most part, technically proficient young white males). There's nothing wrong with not having any experience with what life is like when you're outside that demographic, but there's a lot wrong with not deferring at least a little to the expertise of those that do.
None of the normal news sites would come up. That is odd I thought. Continued onto /., where I first saw the post about it.
Interesting that we'd be mentioning the news lifeline that /. was on 9/11.
At the time, I worked in Oklahoma at a company whose corporate access point to the Internet was in the basement of tower 2. When it collapsed, we lost connectivity (of course). That's when I decided I had to go home for the day. I was NOT going to do without the first-hand online news on /., and it was clear nobody was actually going to be getting any real work done that day.
Nope. Time to go home where I can get news and cry for a while.
It works OK when its not under any kind of serious organized attack. During the 2016 election organized groups of Russian accounts (likely paid, if the various people who have investigated this can be believed) completely pwned the /. moderation system.
OTOH, if you WANTED to read a lot Russian-flavored pro-Trump messages all saying the same things, Slashdot during the last quarter of 2016 was the place to hang out.
While this is an interesting argument, I'd like to point out, as someone who has been using BT headphones for the last 3 years, that I have to replace headphones way more often than cellular devices. I think I'm on my 3rd set with this phone, and the right bud on this one has a short, so the third is not long for this world either.
So moving the "high end DAC" to the headset may have some advantages, but not having to rebuy it as often is NOT one of them.
Ack. I mean "high-uid". That actually shows part of what happened though. I had to ditch /. for sites that had more developed systems of user moderation (where a troll's new account will have "low" reputation) that I no longer am even used to thinking in /. terms about these things.
/. really needs to quit puttering with the shininess of the UI and modernize their reputation system. There are enough of us dedicated users to fend off Troll attacks, if they'd just give us the tools to do so.
I find it amusing that this was posted here, with no mention whatsoever about how hard Slashdot failed us as well during the same period. It was so pwned by low-uid posters with pro-Russian (and only incidentally pro-Trump) posts that I had to quit reading. Anything sensible got modded down to oblivion, and the only way you even knew it ever existed at all was if a Russian ridiculing it got modded +5 insightful.
Previous elections I really relied on /. for good well-reasoned statements of positions on both sides. The paid Russian trolls this time around made it completely useless.
Back in the '90's I was living in Malvern, PA and commuting to Camden, NJ every day to work. My cube-mate used to bring a bottle of store-bought water in every day. Every day I'd joke about taking the empty home, filling it at the tap, and selling it back to him an nickel cheaper.
Then one day I looked at the fine print on the label: "Bottled in Malvern, PA".
Is there an engineer here who can honestly say they've ever traveled with that full a panoply of recording media on them? Oh, wait, he wasn't an engineer either. He said he was a lawyer...
Whatever he was doing, it wasn't engineering as I know it, and he seemed almost comically concerned about being able to record data no matter what media hardware he bumped into on his trips (or even if none were accepted, he had camcorders).
Add to that his cover story when challenged involved name-dropping an out-of-town engineer, and then the CEO himself (the last was clearly a lie), and there aren't a lot of other conclusions one could come to.
That's a good point. I think the pirates saved Lucasfilm, in spite of itself. I remember my dad had a pretty good VHS of it that was still clearly cammed off of a movie screen.
So you admit that liberals are the problem in America, then?
The funniest part of this response is that you probably don't even get how hard you just proved my point.
that mostly favored Republican candidate for President Donald Trump
Yes, of course it did. Even if it didn't. It still did. It has to. Trump is evil, he can do no right.
They don't give a flying F about the man's morals. What's important to them is that his followers have been trained for decades to trust only information that confirms their beliefs and to trust that information no matter what the source. It starts with disimissing any story you don't like as "biased liberal media", and ends up with an industry of people making a living out of lying to your supporters. If only once side gets these kinds of parasites attached to it, perhaps its time to take the hint that that side has a problem.
And really these guys in Macedonia are playing for peanuts. Half of Washington these days makes their living lying to Conservatives, and that's in the Billions or Trillions. Remember all those guys who spent the last 8 years promising to kill "Obamacare" if sent to Washington? They were lying about what it does, and they were lying when they said they'd get rid of it. They are just the tip of the iceberg. There are lobbyists, TV and radio personalities, columnists, authors...
Yes, the Disney Channel is what saved their IP from total irrelevance. But did you know that it started out as a premium channel, like HBO? It took them almost 2 decades to reluctantly realize that wouldn't work and fully switch over to basic cable status. So the "Disney" world you know was one they were brought into kicking and screaming.
Back in the 70's Disney refused to license out their cartoons at a reasonable rate. Instead they produced their own TV program that would once a week air one or two of them. Meanwhile their competitors at Warner Brothers and Hanna-Barberra were tickled pink to take a nickel from anyone who wanted to air their old library.
The result was that Warner Brothers and Hanna-Barberra cartoons were constantly playing during "kid time" (after school on weekdays and Saturday mornings). All kinds of new content was being created too, as fast as it could be shoveled out. Meanwhile hardly anyone was familiar with the Disney cartoon stable, because they hardly ever saw it. Entire generations of viewers can describe Bugs Bunny cartoons in minute detail, and couldn't care less about Mickey Mouse.
They almost entirely destroyed their brand by being so tight-fisted. So now they have to go buy properties that were sensible about trying to maximize exposure (eg: Marvel, Star Wars), but it seems they still haven't learned their lesson.
Spreading out the wealth of a big company over a bigger area is a good thing. Silicon Valley/SF and California in general are out of control in terms of housing prices and cost of living.
This is the thing. I'm sure those areas a beautiful places to live too, or at least were, but they are clearly more than full up of people and can't really support more without some major structural changes to housing. Why keep trying to squeeze 100lb of potatoes into a 10lb bag?
Where I have roots in Tulsa you could buy yourself a lot of top notch engineers with decades of experience for less than 100k. We're perhaps an extreme example, but the country is chock full of places like this. Orlando, New Orleans, Kansas City, St. Louis, etc. Hell, they are practically giving houses away in Detroit.
In the 1850s, German physicist Heinrich Gustav Magnus noticed that when moving through air a spinning object such as a ball experiences a sideways force. The force comes about as follows....
This has to be the most Slashdot way ever to explain something that everyone who has ever played a sport ever needs no explanation for.
Try not to maim yourself walking from your desk to bathroom today.
It is not the faculty that is better, or the instruction, but the classmates. They learn a lot from each other. Which is why the restrictions on "collaboration" are so stupid. They are taking away the very thing that makes Harvard special.
...not to mention that nobody these days is looking to hire programmers to work solo projects. Collaboration is central to the job. I can remember during job interviews a lot of people were only interested in what my grade in the Software Engineering course was, and details about how my group project for that class went.
It was really weird being in that class because suddenly we were *supposed* to work together, and everyone (in my group at least) was absolutely terrible at it. Not only had we never done it before, but the entire culture of the university discouraged it.
I can still remember being flabbergasted after screwing up the 7th manual merge or so when my TA told me about this program the server had that did something called "Revision Control". This wasn't even being taught!
Back when I was taking CS101 in the late 80's (at one of the many "Harvard of the South"s), I remember they ran a "DIFF" on all programming assignment submissions. Three people were caught turning in the same code, and kicked out. I think the class had maybe 15 people in it tops.
I remember a lot of pearl-clutching at the time, because our school had an honor code, and those three had agreed to it. Imagine that, a signed honor code hadn't weeded out cheaters!
The only details I'd ever heard about it was that the lazy SOB's had tried to change variable names to make it look different, but otherwise hadn't even changed a byte of the source files.
If this headline were taken via dictation, it would read:
The Trump Administration Has Announced the End of DACA -- Unless Congress Can Act T...bwhahahaha! No wait! I can get through this...
Obama simply said "We're not going to prosecute these people." That's a huge Constitutional overreach.
No it's not. It's called prosecutorial discretion.
No, no, no silly. Prosecutorial discretion is only what its called when a Republican does it.
The company wired up 71 users, and gave them nine sites to use, tracking their eye movement and recording the time spent on content. On average participants spent 22 per cent more time (i.e. slower task performance) looking at the pages with weak signifiers," the firm notes. Why would that be? Users were looking for clues how to navigate. "The average number of fixations was significantly higher on the weak-signifier versions than the strong-signifier versions. On average, people had 25 per cent more fixations on the pages with weak signifiers."
If you're someone who subsists on ad revenue, this is a good result. Users look at ads on your website longer than your competitors. They look hard at your ads too, because they have to look hard at everything to find what's active. They probably click on ads more often too, in a desperate attempt to find the page controls.
This reminds me of the early days of television, when shows were effectively produced by the advertisers, and their characters would seamlessly start talking about how great their sponsor's product was in the middle of the show. There were inevitably scandals, which eventually led to regulations separating commercials and the programs. But that hasn't happened on the web yet, so designers are perfectly free to be as confusing as possible about what's a website control and what's an ad.
Lorenz says another thing employers need to understand is that wages need to rise, even at entry levels, if they want to fill jobs. He says he is telling manufacturers, "If you are below $12 an hour, I don't know that I'm going to be the person to be able to help you with those jobs."
That's because in the past year, job openings have nearly doubled in western North Carolina where he works, and the supply of additional workers is shrinking fast.
Cappelli says another part of the problem is that employers haven't adjusted to new conditions. For years they've had their choice of workers desperate for a job. Now, the labor market has tightened, but many employers haven't responded, he says.
Pretty obvious what's going on here:
Normal Economy: Recession ends -> labor market shrinks -> wages rise.
US Economy last 40 years: Recession ends -> labor market shrinks -> immigration fills the gap.
US Economy under cartoonishly anti-immigrant government: Recession ends -> labor market shrinks -> immigration goes down anyway -> OMG what do we do!!!?
Obviously wages either have to go up, or managers will have to move the work overseas. Given the attitude of US management for the last 40 years about sharing their wealth increases with workers, I know which I'd bet on...
1. In the EU, you have to stop frequently. Minimum 45 minutes per 4 1/2 hours for commercial drivers. You can lose your license if you don't. So rapid charging stops aren't a slowdown at all.
Believe it or not, in the US it is eleven hours. We have big problems with sleepy truckers on our highways. 300 miles would be in the vicinity of 4+ hours, and having a setup where they physically *have* to stop for a while every 4 hours would be a huge win for us.
RNG
Joe_Dragon was clearly using the French ordering. Randome Nombre généré .